In a paper published in Science Advances, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, the University of Cambridge, and colleagues have investigated whether Plasmodium falciparum-induced malaria shaped human habitat choice between 74,000 and 5,000 years ago, the critical period before humans dispersed widely beyond Africa and before agriculture dramatically altered malaria transmission.

The study shows that malaria, one of humanity's oldest and most persistent pathogens, influenced habitat choice by pushing human groups away from high-risk environments and separating populations across the landscape. Over tens of thousands of years, this fragmentation shaped how populations met, mixed, and exchanged genes, helping create the population structure seen in humans today. The findings suggest that infectious disease was not simply a challenge early humans faced: it was a fundamental factor shaping the deep history of our species.

"We used species distribution models of three major mosquito complexes together with paleoclimate models," explains lead author Dr. Margherita Colucci of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Cambridge. "Combining these with epidemiological data allowed us to estimate malaria transmission risk across sub-Saharan Africa."

The researchers then compared these estimates with an independent reconstruction of the human ecological niche across the same region and time period. The results show that humans strongly avoided, or were unable to persist, in areas with high malaria transmission risk.